Luke 13:10-17
+ In the name of God…..Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’m old enough (just about), to remember when Sunday was
still a day which felt very different from the rest of the week. As a child and
young person my Sunday consisted of going to Sunday school at my local
Methodist Church in the morning. The afternoon would be spent perhaps riding my
bike around the streets of Redcar. There wasn’t much else to do! The only shops
which were open were small corner shops or newsagents, and pubs were limited to
opening within very specific hours, much to the annoyance of my step-father!
You would wake up in the morning and it “felt” like it was Sunday!
Fast forward 25 or 30 years to today and things are very
different from how they used to be! Most shops are open now on Sundays and pub
licensing hours have certainly eased a lot as well. We live in time when
(whether we like it or not) goods and services are available around the
clock……24/7! Switch on the TV to see rolling news whenever we like…….no more
waiting for Closedown somewhere around midnight with the National
Anthem…….anyone else remember that? Head out to the shops whenever you want.
Feel like a trip to the cinema or the theatre? How about whiling away this
Sunday afternoon enjoying lunch and sipping Pimms in a sun-soaked beer garden
somewhere (after coming here to church first of course)? Maybe your ideal
Sunday afternoon is to just sit in front of the TV watching old musicals…….I’ve
been known to do that!
Just don’t tell the Pharisees! They wouldn’t like
it……..really they wouldn’t! The world the Pharisees thought they lived in was a
nicely ordered one. A world where people knew the rules and kept to them. And
if you did happen to break those rules then you would soon know about it, and
probably so would everyone else!
I have the image in my mind of this indignant leader as a
kind of Blakey from the seventies sitcom On the Buses. A man who lived by the
rules and for the rules! I suppose he is something of a “jobsworth”! Those of you
who remember On the Buses will know Blakey as the inspector who was so obsessed
with keeping order in the bus depot and making sure the rules were kept that he
missed out on much of the camaraderie and sense of belonging that his workmates
so obviously enjoyed!
And so this leader goes straight over to where Jesus was and
just starts to lecture the crowd that was gathered there. “You have six days of
the week to come and be healed, come then and not on the Sabbath!” The rules
that he lived his own life by and that he expected others to also keep were
being so openly disregarded. It’s interesting that he doesn’t directly
challenge Jesus himself, but rather he goes for the vulnerable who have come to
Jesus in need of healing!
And Jesus’s response? As he does so many times in the gospels
he turns the tables around and faces the man with his own hypocrisy. “Don’t you
untie your donkey and lead it to drink on the Sabbath? And yet you have the
nerve to complain about someone being healed?” He might as well have just said
to the man, “Get your priorities right”!
The Sabbath had been given by God to the Jews as a day of
rest…..of re-creation, a day free from the cares of the rest of the week. It
was a day full of spiritual meaning, a day when the community could gather
together in prayer and worship. And yet in many ways it had become fossilised
within its own tradition and rules. A day that was supposed to bring freedom
instead brought with it a sense of having to obey the rules. What the Sabbath
as never meant to be was a day when people became so pre-occupied with not
putting a foot wrong!
I should imagine people sitting here today will have a number
of different attitudes towards Sunday. You may be a traditionalist who longs
for the good old days of when the shops were closed and the most you could do
after church was a stroll along the sea-front. On the other hand, there will be
those sitting here who (perhaps on a sunnier day than today) are quite happy to
drive somewhere for the day, potter around the shops or go to the cinema. All
strictly forbidden if we are to keep to the absolute letter of the law! And if
we stop to think about it most of us in someway will probably do something
today that according to the synagogue leader in our reading would count as
“work”.
Jesus, as I’ve said before was never one for sticking to the
rules or conventions. He probably wouldn’t have made a very good Anglican, with
our PCC’s, Synod’s and committees! The one thing for Jesus which came far above
and beyond all these rules and customs was the simple love and grace of God for
all who came to him. Following Jesus isn’t about conforming to a set of rules
laid down in the Bible, it’s not about becoming so bogged down by a long list of
do’s and don’ts that we lose sight of the freedom that Christ offers us. And
it’s certainly not about beating ourselves up when we don’t always manage to
live by those rules.
AMEN
